The
first book in my Books Read list for 2016 was Jim Harrison’s latest – and last,
as it turned out -- book of poetry, Dead Man’s Float. For months after the
release of The Ancient Minstrel, a volume of novellas that came out in time
to be reviewed shortly before his death, I put off opening that book at all.
Then sometime in the summer it occurred to me that I should save it for the end
of the year, thus bookending the year with Harrison. And so I did, and so now,
for the first time, I am reading Jim’s last book of very autobiographical fiction
and missing him and Linda (as I often do, truth be told) all over again.

The
title novella in The Ancient Minstrel took me by surprise. It took my breath away and made
my heart ache. I hadn’t known it would be so personal! And I can picture so
many of the scenes, too – in Lake Leelanau, up in the U.P., down in Patagonia,
Arizona. (The Montana settings are the only ones I don’t know firsthand, only
from movies and previous books of Jim’s.) And the voice, of course, is pure
Jim.

Linda
was not a letter-writer, but I used to write to her once in a while, and once in
a while she would call me on the phone. I will always be grateful to the Fates
for bringing the four of us together again for an evening in Arizona in the
spring of 2015, going on two years ago now. Now there will be no more letters
or postcards or phone calls, no more wine poured or bread broken together.

But
I have – we all
have – Jim’s books, and I cannot express the depth of my gratitude for that. He
got his work done.
He left us poems and stories, himself and his life distilled on pages, and
because of that, and for old times’ sake, I am able to close out this year with
my old friends. Ah, yes, we will, in our house tonight: We'll tak' a cup o'
kindness yet, for
auld lang syne!

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

My
year’s-end reading can get a little frantic, as I’m trying to finish one book
and squeeze in another, but I found time this morning to go through some
articles I’d missed in the November 24 New York Review of Books. One was a review of
a new intellectual biography of Alexander Herzen, who had been little more than
a name to me up to now, and from that review I see Herzen as a fascinating,
congenial writer and quite possibly (I need to learn more) a kindred spirit.

According
to Gary Saul Morson, reviewer of The Discovery of Chance: The Life and
Thought of Alexander Herzen, and quotations he gives fromAileen M. Kelly’s book in support, Herzen was, throughout
his life, tugged in two directions, “inclined in turn to romantic utopianism
and ironic realism.” As a self-described romantic pragmatist, I was instantly
sympathetic.

Herzen
did not buy general formulae -- big slogans, principles, goals, abstractions,
e.g., the idea of ‘progress.’ A thinker ahead of his time, he denied teleology
to nature before such a view became the norm. Nineteenth-century
determinism saw the future unrolling necessarily from the present, such that if
we could but identify all contributing factors we would have complete
foreknowledge. Herzen, like Henri Bergson, denied the sweeping claims of determinism,
then so firmly held across disciplines and political views. In his essays, he
saw the determinist view as one of many absolutes people used as substitutes
for God, “the mysticism of science.” As Morson puts it, “[L]aws and chance
interact. Repeat a situation, and it might develop differently.” Evolution
without a predetermined endpoint. Darwinian.

Here
is a line, quoted in the reviewed book from Herzen’s own book, From the
Other Shore:

The future
does not exist.

It
is not necessary, according to research paper guidelines, to set apart and
center such a brief quotation as that, but I do it intentionally, as it is the
crucial kernel of any denial of determinism.

To
his Bergsonian denial (I cannot help seeing it as Bergonian) of determinism,
Herzen joined a Wittgensteinian propensity to question himself as rigorously as
he questioned others. It is a rare philosopher -- a rare human being -- who can
say of a view he held formerly with great conviction and passion, “I was
wrong,” so I very much want to explore the thought of Alexander Herzen in 2017.
For now, for this week, I am delighted to have stumbled on an introduction to
his work.

Denying
determinism, Herzen went on to say of the future,

It is created by the combination of a thousand causes,
some necessary, some accidental, plus human will....

And
so, from what little I have read in a single book review, I’m pretty sure
Herzen would not have seen moral progress as inevitable. He would not
have seen the “long arc of the universe” bending necessarily toward justice or any predetermined end. He
would have seen that as simply one more silly myth, a comforting but basically
irrational belief.

Where
does that leave us? Well, please note, if there is no predetermined end, no
“necessary” direction that will manifest in one future rather than another, the
possibility of moral progress cannot be ruled out, either. (“He loved
italics,” the reviewer notes of Herzen, listing some of his other writing
excesses. Sigh! We have that in common, too!) And note also Herzen’s inclusion
of “human will” in the myriad of causes that will bring about whatever future
comes about. I think it leaves us with a lot of possible outcomes, some of them desirable.

Now
if someone says, “I don’t believe in x” but engages in x on a consistent basis,
does that person really hold the stated belief? I don’t see it. On the other
hand, I see other people all the time, in my own life and in the public arena,
who act on and live their beliefs. This is what I was struggling, probably
very awkwardly, to say in my previous post about faith as practice, creating a future of justice.

The future is in our hands. The world will be what we make of it. What shall it be, my
friends? What will we make of this year so soon to begin?

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

An essay's conclusion, writes William Dereshewicz, is not something we refer
to as a fact but rather as wisdom. He allows that the ideas in an essay are
“often openly impressionistic and provisional, colored by feeling, memory and
mood,” going on to say,

But the essay draws its strength not from separating reason and
imagination but from putting them in conversation. A good essay moves fluidly
between thought and feeling. It subjects the personal to the rigors of the
intellect and the discipline of external reality. The truths it finds are more
than just emotional. – William Dereshewicz, “In Defense of Facts,” The
Atlantic, January-February 2017

Not
every reader is as fascinated by the essay form and its history as I am, but
anyone who has been awake this past year realizes that there have been bloody
assaults on truth and facts, and many of us find that cause for concern.

Although
my new Atlantic
arrived last Friday, it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that I got around to
Dereshewicz. I’d started the morning with the longest piece in the issue, “My
President Was Black,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Mine, too, I want to tell
Coates, and I have a lot more to say about that, but I’ll save it for another
time. For now let me just say that all my readers who don’t subscribe to The
Atlantic should
go right out and buy the current issue, because the Coates article alone is
worth the cover price. After you read the whole issue, you’ll probably want to
subscribe. I hope so.

Here
are a few lines from the editorial in the current issue:

Obama is not an unalloyed idealist. He has complicated feelings
about the nature of humanity, and harbors few illusions, in particular, about
the moral systems that govern many other countries. But he has always seemed
sincere in his belief that America is a place that possesses a unique capacity
to become better, and then better again. “The arc of the moral universe is
long [my emphasis added], but it bends toward justice,” he often said,
quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., but he really meant that America’s arc bends
toward justice.

That
stopped me in my tracks. Light dawned, belatedly, in one bookseller’s brain!
The title of Kathleen Stocking’s book: The Long Arc of the Universe – that was her
reference!

Originally
I didn’t cared for the title. It seemed vague and having little to do with the
content of the essays – but only because I had completely missed the
allusion!
When I’d shared my initial misgivings about the title with the author, she
kindly refrained from pointing out my ignorance. I wish now she had not been so
careful of my feelings!

Because
now it makes perfect sense. It captures perfectly Stocking’s optimism in
the future, a clear-eyed optimism she shares with President Obama, despite hard
truths both have faced in this world.

Neither
Obama nor Stocking is optimistic because they live in ivory tower isolation.
Both have served – Obama in Chicago activism, the Illinois Senate, and the
White House; Stocking in country schools, California prisons, and in the Peace
Corps – in ways and places demanding a pragmatic, hands-on, the-buck-stops-here
approach to problem-solving. Neither can say that the problems they tackled are
now only historical footnotes. That should go without saying. Problems persist.
The world is hard on people, and it’s harder on some than on others. But, like
President Obama, Kathleen Stocking continues to have faith in the human
capacity to become better and to make the world better. And both can say they
put themselves on the line, personally, to do something toward that
end.

Obama is quoted in the Coates article as saying, elaborating on the
statement of Martin Luther King, Jr.,

To be optimistic about the long-term trends ... doesn’t mean
everything is going to go in a smooth, direct, straight line....

Well,
if optimism had to mean that, there couldn’t be an optimist anywhere in
the world, could there? Kathleen Stocking wrote me in an e-mail, following the
November election:

Ruth Gruber died today. She was 105. She was in Germany hearing
Hitler's rants in 1932 and sounded the alarm, but no one heard. She
photographed the people in the camps, the boats of refugees turned away by
the British warships from Palestine, and so on. It can happen again. And it can
happen here. There's no doubt at all in my mind about that. But I also believe,
with Obama (that whippersnapper, that youngster) that history is not a straight
line. Our species is evolving toward greater and greater consciousness, but
there is backsliding, detours, and the process is slow, in any event. Julian of
Norwich had to pretend she couldn't read and write and that everything was
coming from heaven and had to be translated. Because any woman who could read
or write was in league with the devil. As we all know.

But
as she writes in her most recent book of personal essays, The Long Arc of
the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale:

The hard thing about living anywhere, I decide, and traveling in
general, is that one can never live long enough or see enough of the world to
fully understand the long arc of the universe and make sense of it. Little bits
are all we get, and it’s never enough to see the big picture.

Holiday decorations by Kathleen Stocking

I do not call myself a pessimist. At the same time, I often find it hard to be
optimistic about “the big picture.” Little corners, yes. Pockets. Certain
stretches of time here and there. But it’s true that none of us gets to see “the big picture,”
the “long arc.” Kathleen Stocking and President Obama, however, remain
optimistic in their long views, and they have seen much more than I can claim
to have seen, so I’m taking their words seriously.

The
philosopher of my heart is Henri Bergson, who lived in France from 1859 to
1941. In his heyday, he had been the equivalent of a rock star. The public swarmed
his lecture hall at the Sorbonne – it was the place to be! – and
finally a section of seats had to be cordoned off and reserved for students,
because socialites had started coming in to the lecture preceding Bergson’s to assure
themselves seats for the star.

Never
a novelist, always a philosopher and teacher, he was nevertheless awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, but by 1940 his star had faded, and he lived
quietly, out of the limelight. Then came the Occupation. Bergson’s earlier
glory was not forgotten by those who had assumed power. Eager to piggy-back on
his reputation, they offered him blandishments, their recognition – which
apparently they thought would be an irresistible inducement. Bergson said no.

The
immediate cause of his death during the Nazi occupation of Paris was
bronchitis, but I have always suspected heartbreak. Ill for many years with
crippling arthritis, on the arm of a caregiver he left his sickbed to register
as a Jew, despite Nazi assurances that he was “exempt” from the new, odious
racial laws. Again, he could have sold out, but he didn’t.

Bergson
died on the fourth of January, 1941, and I have always imagined him on a cold
winter day, in the city he loved, arriving home exhausted to die of a broken
heart – in part because he had been a most optimistic philosopher, sure that
the human spirit was evolving in something higher and finer -- and whenever I
have told the life story of Bergson to someone unfamiliar with his name, it has
been hard for me to keep tears from my eyes at the end. But the truth is that I
wasn’t there. I did not know him. And the day he died was probably not, as it
has always been in my imagination, the same day he stood in line to register
for his yellow star.

Undoubtedly he felt deep, wrenching sorrow for
what had come to Europe in his own last days, and I cannot imagine that his heart
did notache, terribly -- for the Jews, for France, and for the world. But that he chose to show solidarity
with the persecuted, though he had never practiced the religion, was a choice
entirely in line with his philosophy and his entire life. By his own definition
of freedom, that is, arrived at as early as his 1889 doctoral dissertation (Essaisur les données immédiates de la conscience), his was a free act in 1941, neither
mechanical reflex nor directed from anything exterior to his own soul. It came
out of everything he was, out of his entire life leading up to that moment.

And
exercising his freedom would have been, necessarily, for him, an affirmation
and demonstration of the possibility of freedom. Would he also have been able
to maintain, amidst the horrors of that time in history, his faith in the
evolution of the spirit?

Ready now for holidays

Richard
Leakey of Kenya,when entering political life,
was asked by an interviewer, “Are you willing to give your life for this
country?” Leakey is a white man whose home is a black African country, and the
subtext of the question was that in running for office he might risk death. His
answer, however, spoke not to the risk of death but to commitment: “What else
does any of us have to give?”

It
is not for us to question life, Viktor Frankl wrote. Life questions us. How will we
answer?
An amazing, inspiring person! He saw the absolute worst of the twentieth
century and somehow kept faith in humanity.

How
do these people do it? How do they maintain faith and optimism, despite all
they see first-hand that could drive them to despair?

There
will always be those in the moral universe who blatantly steal and rob from
others, as there will always be the less obvious free riders, who simply manage not to pay their
legitimate dues. But at the same time there will also be, besides the mass of
responsible dues-payers, those who not only pay their own dues but who move
mankind forward (or at least keep us from being forever lost in the abyss) by being extraordinary, by doing more than their share, by achieving
wisdom and by serving as models for the rest of us.

Moral
progress, if there is such a thing, is not a smooth, direct line. Okay. There will be
backsliding. All right. But does it exist at all, this moral progress? Is the
human spirit evolving into something better? Was Henri Bergson able to believe
that still as he closed his eyes for the last time?

Martin
Luther -- not
my favorite guy! -- thought faith a matter of grace: You are given the gift, or
you’re not. But what if faith, like any virtue in the Aristotelian sense, is
a matter ofpractice?
You get up every day, regardless of circumstances, despite difficulties, and
you do what you can. You’re as frightened as the next person, but you choose not to let
fear paralyze you. And doing what you can, one day at a time, despite fear,
strengthens your faith in the future and in your fellow human beings. Do you
think it might work that way?

It’s
the only way I can make sense of it – moral progress not as a matter of
inevitability, not operating blind like the evolution of the physical universe, but as
something created by human choices and actions. Because if the long arc of the
universe is to bend toward justice, is it not up to each of us to do our part,
though all we can see is our little bit of here and now?

Warmest holiday wishes, my friends. Keep the faith! And thank you for being in my life!P.S. 12/23/2016 - Here is a very inspiring essay. My sister Bettie sent me the link. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, all!

Saturday, December 17, 2016

I
don’t have an important theme today and really not much at all to report.
Because we have different plow arrangements this year, we’re not quite able yet
to predict with confidence what time the accumulated snow and drifts will be
cleared away, but we were able to get out of our driveway this morning by ten
o’clock, an acceptable winter day departure hour.

So,
la-di-da, now I’m here in Northport, here in my bookstore, la-di-da, nothing
much to say on the blog, though I’ve had lively conversations already today
with customers. All I really want to do is show my Christmas
tree and flowers again! Even though my tree never looks as good in pictures as
it feels to me when I’m in the same room with it. String
of cool LED lights and silver ball ornaments were loaned to me this year by Pat
Scott. Marjorie Farrell made the pretty paper star ornaments.

Clare
Gengarelly brought me the bright, happy poinsettia plant (how many of us can
spell that word without looking it up?), and Kathleen Stocking brought and
arranged the beautiful roses and lilies and their companions.

(Later insert: Coming back to add a closeup of this cute little holiday mouse,sent to me by my sister, Deborah.)

So really, I just wanted to share these beautiful things with readers of Books in
Northport. It’s okay for us, some days, for a few minutes, just to relax and
smile. We don’t need any excuse to appreciate beauty, do we? The snow softly
falling outside is beautiful, too.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

You
know, I’m sure, the old saw that starts out, “If it looks like a duck and
quacks like a duck...” Well, I want to tell you that that would not be your local
philosopher-bookseller! You’d know that, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you be able to
tell the difference after over nine years of Books in Northport? If you’re a
friend and/or a customer or even if we’ve never met but you follow Books in
Northport from afar, don’t you recognize my voice in these lines? And if a
strange voice were to break in and take over Books in Northport, wouldn’t you
know something was wrong? Wouldn’t your suspicions be aroused?

What
the -- ?! Why on earth do I pose these silly rhetorical questions? If curious,
please read on.

Insisting on holiday cheer

As
a general rule, I am not one for compulsively checking blog stats. While now
and then a post getting more than the usual daily attention can boost my
spirits, seeing low numbers on things written from my heart can be
discouraging, so why give myself the grief? Instead, for the most part, I just
say what I have to say, post a link on Facebook, and the pay is the same
(zilch!), whether no one reads or hundreds do. Once
in a while, though, I get curious. I was curious the other day, and what I
found on the stats report was, as Lewis Carroll had Alice say, “curiouser and
curiouser,” to say the least. While stats for individual posts were
unsurprising – pretty much as usual – total number of blog views had spiked.
The spike was sharp and not explainable by a large number of views of any
particular post or posts. What was going on?

A
look at ‘traffic sources’ did nothing to dispel the mystery, largest numbers of
visitors coming from Google or Facebook, as is usually the case. ‘Audience,’
however, showed a different story. There on the world map, with shades of green
showing where viewers are located when they visit, the darkest green covered
the area of the former USSR. The rest of the world paled in comparison.

I
shared the surprising result with David, who asked why Russians would be
reading my blog. Well, I don’t think they are. Ten times as many Russians as
Americans? Why would Russians feel a sudden hunger for a northern Michigan
bookseller’s take on Hermann Hesse or scenes of our village in winter? I doubt
there is anything in my content or CV fascinating to these new “viewers,” but in light of current events their presence is alarming, even if, as seems likely, "they" are machines rather than people.

Think about it. Blogger is a big deal world-wide. As the anniversary of Tienanmen Square
approached, the Chinese government blocked Blogger, making it inaccessible to
Internet users in China unless they were able to cobble together a circuitous
alternate route to the blogs, and the same was true of Google and Tumblr.

(Do
a search and read about it if you don’t believe me, but bear in mind that searches
are tailored to individual searchers, and your results would not necessarily
match mine. In that way, creators of algorithms need to take their share of the
blame for Americans reading only news sources with views matching those they
already had.)

Moreover,
with the new Google Plus service (which I do not use), blogs can be
automatically connected to Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, Tumblr,
WordPress, Gmail, DO Note, Weebly and other sites and services. And now, think of
all the bloggers who update using their mobile phones. “We’re all connected”
means, among other more positive things, that we are all that much more
vulnerable.

For
over nine years, I have loved writing Books in Northport and connecting with
people around the world -- those who actually connect, that is, not hostile,
anonymous individuals, groups, or worms that only hover and stalk, with no
interest in what I write, not even anything personal against me as a person or
bookseller. Now I wonder how long I and other blogger friends will be able to
maintain this precious outlet that has been for so long, for us and our
readers, literary as well as social. I don’t know what might happen or when
anything at all might come down on us.

Repressive
governments are not interested in our fates as individuals, but they are very interested in restricting, in the most general, sweeping sense, our freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of
movement, and the free exchange of ideas. It’s unlikely that darkness and
silence will fall on us tomorrow – more likely we will be overwhelmed, day by day, by blinding metaphorical searchlights and fake news and enemies masquerading as friends.

If another voice breaks in here one day, though – or if your access is mysteriously
denied – I'm telling you now, ahead of time, not to take it lying down. In fact, start now to do what you can. Think
about it. What can you do? Now do it!

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Last
year I read Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), a book I picked up
because our reading circle had not read any works of German literature and I
wondered if this one might fill the bill. In the end, although I was glad to
have read it, I felt the heavy weight of philosophy and relative paucity of
plot would not be welcome to the group as a whole. We may take the Thomas Mann
route, but if anyone has other suggestions, send them my way.

More
recently there came into my hands (due to a friend’s downsizing her library for
a move to smaller living quarters) a volume of Hesse’s entitled Reflections, an expanded version,
first published in Germany in 1971, of a smaller book of brief passages the
author had had privately printed from his novels, letters and other writings.
“Aphorisms are something like jewels;” he notes in the book’s epigraph, “rarity
increases their value, and they are enjoyable only in small doses.” He is
probably right about the small doses -- I seldom read more than two or three
pages at a time from Reflections -- but it is rewarding to dip at random into
this box of jewels and pull out a treasure to admire and pass along. One of the
first I wanted to share with friends was this:

If here and now, in the face of today’s difficulties and
requirements, we behave with a certain amount of human decency, it is possible
that the future, too, will be human.

Many
friends approved and liked this quotation, but my friend Helen pointed out,
quite rightly, that everything hangs on the big “If.” Hesse wrote the lines
in 1922, she observed, and could hardly have imagined what would come to pass
in Germany (he had moved to Switzerland) in the next two decades – a nightmare
that was anything but decent. Helen and I have no quarrel over the facts. What
I must
hope, however, is that in our ‘today,’ knowing what grew out of that
earlier European ‘today’ when decency was abandoned, we will remember that
nightmare and not accept behavior that would bring on a repetition of history’s
modern European Dark Ages. The danger, I agree, is very real.

The
Hesse book remains by my side. After having written a response to something I’d
seen and been troubled by on Facebook, I
found last night a couple of quotations appropriate to the subject of heroism
and courage. The first is short and to the point:

As I see it, the love of heroism is permissible only in those who
risk their own lives; in others it is not only a delusion but also, I believe,
a ruthlessness, which fills me with shame and anger.

Ruthless encouragement to others to risk their lives
while we remain safely at home, handing out judgments: that aspect of a modern
“warrior culture” should give us reason to pause and reflect.

The
following passage in the book enlarges on the theme of courage by examining its
opposite:

Anyone who shirks the labors, sacrifices, and dangers that his
people must undergo is a coward. But no less a coward and traitor is the man
who betrays the principles of thought to material interests, who, for example, is
willing to let the holders of power decide how much is two times two. To
sacrifice intellectual integrity, love of truth, the laws and methods of
thought to any other interest, even that of the fatherland, is treason. When in
the battle of interests and slogans the truth, like the individual, is in
danger of being devalued, disfigured, and trampled under foot, our one duty is
to resist and save the truth – or rather, the striving for truth – for that is
our highest article of faith.

Do
these statements seem controversial?

·“[A]
coward and traitor is the man who betrays the principles of thought...”

·“To
sacrifice intellectual integrity ... is treason.”

·“...[O]ur
one duty is to ... save the truth.”

Do you think Hesse exaggerates?

These are heavy thoughts, but I hope the small doses, if it did
not win for them a warm welcome, at least allowed them a fair hearing. Anyone
interested can read more about the life of Hermann Hesse here.For other books of
quotations, less scolding and more can-do in nature, look here.

And
if you look to movies for inspiration, look no further than “Broken Trail,” a
surprising Western starring Robert Duvall that brings together historical
detail, believable dialogue, and stunning cinematography. The story has a
Western’s requisite heroes and villains but manages to feel real and gritty and
dangerous without plunging into a cesspool of four-letter words. And the
horses! The horses are magnificent!

The
beauty of horses, the companionship of dogs! What would the world be without
them? Bleak indeed!

Friday, December 9, 2016

From
inside the house, in the night, darkness all around, one feels the cushion of
new snow around the foundations and blanketing the surrounding fields. We
were warned to expect the storm on Wednesday night, beginning at midnight, but
in the dark of Thursday morning I knew before looking that it had not come. The
wind’s sound was unchanged: it swept yet across bare ground. Gusts of blowing flakes came midmorning Tuesday, but little accumulated, and still the cold
wind blew. The forecast was rewritten, moved off another twenty-four hours, and
expected accumulation revised upward.

Waking
around 4 a.m. on Friday, however, I felt the difference immediately. Utter
stillness ... that sense of being wrapped ... soundless insulation. In the
South, I thought, there would be quiet after big winds as live oaks, sea grapes
and palms would cease their rattling, but it would be an empty calm, would it
not? Up North, in winter, here the calm of winter’s first heavy, swaddling snow
is dense.

I
got up for to make my morning café au lait, anticipating the light that would
reveal, in a few hours, a transformed landscape, but for the moment content with my
books, beginning my day’s reading with the final chapter of The Swerve, reading the story of
Montaigne’s copy of Lucretius, of Anne Hutchingson’s translation, and of
Jefferson’s correspondence with John Adams. For the morning, at
least, in the dark with an untouched blanket of snow wrapping my old farmhouse,
I smiled to think of the social pleasures of reading – not only communion with
writers distant in time and space but also contemporary conversations and
correspondence with book-loving friends.

We
are not isolated from one another, we readers. We do not withdraw from society
when we go into our books. We are deeply social.

I
reach for pen and paper to begin a letter to a friend.

*****

Later.
The snow was not as deep in the yard as I imagined it would be, but that scene (and the one here in town) may change in
the hours ahead. Meanwhile, if you are up here at the north end of the Leelanau County
and don’t usually see The Glen Arbor Sun, stop by and pick up a copy today at
Dog Ears Books to enjoy the article on “Orchards and Orphans” by Kathleen
Stocking. Also, please note that, by Kathleen’s own request, we are running a “blue
light special” (minus the blue lights) on her essay book trilogy: $25 for all
three, if you get in here fast enough! That’s practically like buying one book
and getting the other two for free – and what a great holiday gift for a
special someone on your list!

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Sticking
to business isn’t always easy during the distracting holiday season. Add to
the usual seasonal distractions all the political furor of 2016, and you have a
recipe for scattered attention. But when loyal downstate customers turn to
their Up North bookseller for holiday gifts, that bookseller has to come
through, and I’ve been happy to oblige, along with filling requests and queries
from closer to home. And for those looking for gift ideas, I’ve tried to come
up with a few original thoughts, aesthetic, historical, and inspirational. Board books for little ones have been big sellers this year. I can hardly keep them in stock!

Once
our pack turns toward home, however, my thoughts turn to welcome domestic
distractions: what to fix for supper and what book to settle in with afterward.
One of three different books I’m reading at home these evenings is The
Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt, the story of a
fifteenth-century hunter (“perhaps the greatest book hunter of the
Renaissance”) of ancient classical manuscripts and how his rediscovery of On
the Nature of Things,
by Lucretius, influenced the course of Western thought from then until now. I
loved the way The Swerve began with the author’s happening on and purchasing a
copy of Lucretius for its cover illustration and only later, opening the pages,
falling in love with the text of a work previously unknown to him. Serendipity!
The thrill of used books! Oh, lovely distractions!

Our
weather here Up North has turned very cold. Last night and all day today the wind has been
fierce, with a forecast is for big storms tonight, possibly delivering as
much as ten inches of snow to cover our still-bare (as of this afternoon) cold
ground. The Christmas tree in Northport has already looked good but will look
even better with snow on the branches.

Friday, December 2, 2016

Sun
gave way to rain, with temperatures still mild enough that, except for bare
trees, a wakening Rip Van Winkle might guess the month to be October rather
than December. We rub our eyes and blink in confusion. But there is the big
lighted tree at the T-intersection of Waukazoo and Nagonaba, and we remember
Saturday’s holiday festivities throughout the village.

Her busy days a blur, one family member says. My mind blurs, too.
In the background, on the radio, I seem to hear the Red Queen shouting, “Off
with her head!”

Other aspects of life, however, such as the greater public scene,
cannot always be held at bay, and I think of Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and
Prejudice, saying to her father, “And they must marry! Yet he is such
a man!”

Interludes
of stimulating conversation make up parts of most days, as friends and
customers (customer-friends) and I share coping strategies and positive actions
we can take in a difficult political climate. (Thank you for your presence!)

Hard
to ignore, and yet paying attention only fuels anger and frustration, so I pick
up another book or a pencil or a pen – to read, to write, to draw.

You
see, I had an entirely different post to write, but it went out the window, and
the wind blew it away. Strange winds blow these days, but standing firm is a
challenge I fear will only grow greater with time. Is it possible we may look
back at these “difficult” times soon with something like nostalgia? Or will
they possibly give way to calmer, more reasonable days. Which is more likely?

On
Thursday afternoon for a while I fell into The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!

That Youth’s sweet-cented Manuscript should close!

The
Nightingale that in the Branches sang,

Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!

Roses!
Those I brought into the house in mid-November are nearing their final days,
but they have given me a long run, and the petals are still fragrant. They will
not be dust
for years to come. Remember.